The present invention relates generally to the field of data communication, and more particularly to methods of automatically generating reusable network configuration objects in clustered systems.
Clustered systems are defined to work as a unit, and they typically appear as such to network clients communicating with target applications running on the individual machines of the cluster. The machines of the cluster are attached to the same communications and storage networks and they run the same applications. The machines of the cluster work together for backup and recovery and load balancing. The clustered systems typically share the same configurations and network policies.
It is desirable to be able to create reusable network configuration objects. Certain configuration resources, such as TCP or UDP ports and security encryption and authentication levels for network security policy are the same for each individual system in the cluster. Accordingly, such resources are non-system-specific and it is not difficult to create reusable configuration objects for such resources. However, certain resources, such as IP addresses are unique to each individual system. Moreover, individual systems typically have several different IP addresses. Accordingly, it is difficult and time consuming to create reusable configuration objects for system specific resources.